> If it's read-only data, I feel like hug-of-death should not be the norm.
That's what PeerTube is good at. Each video has a home site and a master copy, and each watcher helps to redistribute the video. So, if your cat video goes viral, your tiny server doesn't get hugged to death. At least in theory.
This is less distributed than bittorrent or Usenet. It's just distributed caching. Only videos currently being watched are replicated.
Now, PeerTube doesn't help with discovery. PeerTube sites only list their own videos. For this to take off and replace YouTube, a discovery mechanism (what we used to call a "search engine") is needed. Those exist.[1] (There are others, but some have bad SSL cert warnings.)
If you break the problem into discovery, hosting, and caching, all three parts are tractable. And no one part has enough authority to get uppity and act like they're in charge.
[1] https://search.joinpeertube.org/